Back to Basics: Beginner’s Guide to Twitter for Businesses

Tweets, hashtags, mentions, and replies. Jeesh. There’s a long list of lingo associated with this fast-paced, real-time social network, which is said to have over 232 million monthly active users.

The Basics:

Main Purpose: This particular social media platform is one-of-a-kind from its counterparts like Facebook, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest. Twitter allows users to share news, insights, information, quick thoughts, and jokes in 140 characters or less. These quick bits of information are displayed on user profiles (usually publicly). Users may “follow” each other to keep tabs on these updates and to converse to specific users.

Twitter is great for businesses to:

Connect with customers

Receive customer feedback

Discover new industry trends

Give away coupons and promotions

Promote referral links to website and blog

Basic Twitter Lingo:

Tweet: A 140-character message

Retweet (RT): Re-sharing or giving credit to someone else’s tweet

Feed: The stream on your home page that aggregates tweets from all users you follow

Mention (@): A way to reference a user in a tweet. This allows you to communicate to a user directly and publicly by including their username (@smallscreenpro)

Direct Message (DM): Private 140-charcter message that’s directly sent from a user. You can choose to receive the message from any Twitter user or from those you follow. You can only direct message a user who follows you.

Hashtag (#): Think of hashtag as a reference to a topic or event (#Healthcare #Olympics). You can include hashtags into your tweets to allow other users to find your content or click on the hashtag to see all tweets that mention that hashtag in real time, even if it’s from people you don’t follow.

Getting Started on Twitter:

Showoff Your Brand

The first step is to build your brand experience on Twitter. This is through setting up you background, header, and profile images that coincide with your company branding – logos, colors, and username should be consistent.

NOTE: Your username should be a company name or an abbreviated form if it’s too long. Usernames can be edited and changed at anytime – they’re not permanent!

Build Out Profile

Include information your company, and be sure to include a way for people to learn more about your company through a website or blog and contact you if they have questions.

Start a Following

Start following people in these categories:

Your customers

Business partners, suppliers, contractors, vendors

Competitors and peers

Professional organizations/groups

Local associations

Businesses within professional network

Your Twitter experience is dependent on who you’re following, pay attention to who you follow to see the most success.

Begin Talking

Gradually jump in when you feel comfortable. Generally, you’ll want to balance out these five types of Twitter communication: tweets, replies, direct messages, mentions, and retweets.

Experiment to see what types of post get the most response, how tweets are worded, what reactions you receive when you mention, direct message, retweet, reply to other users.

With a 140-character limit, it’s important to get straight to the point and be concise with messages.

Drive Traffic to Website and Blog

Now that you’ve got the hang of it, Twitter is a great tool for driving traffic to your website or blog. To do this all you’ll need a message with a URL for users to click and “learn more”.

Since you have 140 characters to write, URL shorteners are useful for shortening long web addresses.

Connect Twitter to Your Online Presence

There are a couple ways to do this:

Include a Twitter link to your website

Embed your Twitter feed to your website or blog by using the “Widgets” feature that’s found under Twitter settings.

Feature social plugins on your website or under blog plugins for users to click to directly share content on their accounts

Small Screen Producer is dedicated to designing and creating your company’s total web presence. As the leading innovator of digital media, we have the experience to capitalize your unique strengths and help your business succeed. Contact us today.